The Full-Scale Tunnel’s thirty-by sixty-foot test section opened wide enough to swallow a full-sized plane. Though the West Area’s Sixteen-Foot High-Speed Tunnel had an exoskeleton the size of a battleship, the test section—the area where engineers, sitting at a control panel, observed the air flowing over the model—was only the size of a rowboat. But in order to accelerate the air to the necessary speed, giant wooden turbines had to accelerate the blast through the entirety of the tunnel’s circuit.
